Paper 10 Overview: The Paradise Trinity

The Paradise Trinity of eternal Deities enables the Universal Father to escape the limitations of absolute personality while perfectly associating his infinite personal will with the absoluteness of Deity. The Trinity is formed by the Universal Father, Eternal Son, and Infinite Spirit, who together provide for the Father's liberation from limitations inherent in primacy, perfection, changelessness, eternity, universality, absoluteness, and infinity. Through their unified action, the Trinity allows for complete expression and perfect revelation of the divine nature.

Looking at the circle of eternity from our present position, the author asserts that the only inescapable inevitability in universe affairs is the Paradise Trinity. The Trinity serves as the essential foundation for all cosmic reality, making it possible for the Infinite to achieve threefold personalization while maintaining the absolute oneness of Deity. Without the Trinity, the author cannot conceive how the universe could achieve both the completeness of the absoluteness in Deity unity and the fullness of volitional liberation found in the threefold personalization of Deity.

The Paradise Trinity facilitates the Father's escape from the constraints of personality absolutism by perfectly associating God's limitless expression of infinite personal will with the absoluteness of Deity. The Eternal Son and various Sons of divine origin, together with the Conjoint Actor and his universe children, provide the means for the Father's liberation from limitations that would otherwise be inherent in primacy, perfection, changelessness, eternity, universality, absoluteness, and infinity.

The Paradise Trinity effectively provides for the full expression and perfect revelation of the eternal nature of Deity. Through the Trinity, the Stationary Sons afford a complete and perfect revelation of divine justice. The Trinity represents Deity unity, eternally resting upon the absolute foundations of the divine oneness of the three original, coordinate, and coexistent personalities: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, whose unified action makes possible the functioning of all reality.

From the beginning of eternity, the Father established a policy of profound self-distribution arising from his selfless, loving nature. This fundamental aspect of his character causes him to reserve for himself only those powers and authorities that he finds impossible to delegate or bestow upon others. Throughout eternity, the Universal Father has divested himself of every part of himself that could possibly be bestowed on any other Creator or creature, delegating to his divine Sons and their associated intelligences every power and authority that could be transferred.

In the administration of local universes, the Father has made each Sovereign Creator Son as perfect, competent, and authoritative as the Eternal Son is in the original central universe. The Father has given away, with the dignity and sanctity of personality possession, all of himself and his attributes that he could possibly divest himself of, in every way, in every age, in every place, and to every person, in every universe except that of his central indwelling. Divine personality is characterized not by self-centeredness but by self-distribution and the sharing of personality, which defines divine freewill selfhood.

Through the technique of trinitization, the Father divests himself of the unqualified spirit personality that becomes the Son, simultaneously constituting himself as the Father of this Son and securing unlimited capacity to become the divine Father of all subsequently created intelligent will creatures. As the absolute and unqualified personality, the Father can function only as and with the Son, but as a personal Father, he continues to bestow personality upon diverse hosts of intelligent will creatures at different levels.

After the Father bestows upon his Son the fullness of himself in a complete and perfect act of self-giving, the eternal partners jointly bestow those qualities and attributes that constitute another being like themselves. This conjoint personality, the Infinite Spirit, completes the existential personalization of Deity. The Son is essential to the fatherhood of God, and the Spirit is necessary for the fraternity of the Second and Third Persons. Three persons constitute a minimum social group, which is one of many reasons supporting the inevitability of the Conjoint Actor.

Despite there being only one Deity, there are three positive and divine personalizations of Deity evidenced in statements like "Let us make mortal man in our own image." Throughout the Urantian writings, references to the acts and doings of plural Deity clearly show recognition of the existence and working of the three Sources and Centers. The Son and Spirit maintain equal relations with the Father in the Trinity association, although in time and as personalities, they reveal relationships of diverse nature.

The divine Sons are indeed the "Word of God," while the children of the Spirit are truly the "Act of God." God speaks through the Son and, with the Son, acts through the Infinite Spirit, with the Son and Spirit working together as equal brothers with admiration and love for their honored and respected Father. While the Father, Son, and Spirit are equal in nature and being, there are clear differences in their universe performances, and when acting alone, each person of Deity appears limited in absoluteness.

Among all absolute associations, the Paradise Trinity stands unique as an exclusive association of personal Deity. God functions as God only in relation to God and those who can know God, but as absolute Deity, he functions only in the Paradise Trinity and in relation to universe totality. Eternal Deity achieves perfect unification while maintaining three perfectly individualized persons of Deity, allowing simultaneous expression of all diversity of character traits and infinite powers with the divine unity of universe functions.

The Trinity represents an association of infinite persons functioning in a non-personal capacity but not in contradiction to personality, similar to how a father, son, and grandson might form a corporate entity that is non-personal yet subject to their personal wills. The Paradise Trinity is real, existing as the Deity union of Father, Son, and Spirit, yet the Father, Son, or Spirit, or any two of them, can function in relation to this Trinity or collaborate in non-Trinity ways as persons, though such collaboration does not constitute the Trinity itself.

Rather than speaking of the Trinity as having attributes, it is more consistent to regard this association of divine beings as having functions such as justice administration, totality attitudes, coordinate action, and cosmic overcontrol. These functions are actively supreme, ultimate, and (within the limits of Deity) absolute as far as all living realities of personality value are concerned. The functions of the Paradise Trinity extend beyond the sum of the Father's divinity endowment plus the specialized attributes of the Son and Spirit.

The Trinity association of the three Paradise Deities results in the evolution, eventuation, and deification of new meanings, values, powers, and capacities for universal revelation, action, and administration. Living associations—whether human families, social groups, or the Paradise Trinity—are not simply augmented by arithmetical summation, as the group potential always far exceeds the simple sum of the attributes of the component individuals. The Trinity maintains unique attitudes toward the entire universe of past, present, and future, functioning simultaneously with multiple perspectives regarding any isolated situation or event.

All law originates with the First Source and Center, who is law itself. The administration of spiritual law belongs to the Second Source and Center, while the revelation of law and the promulgation and interpretation of divine statutes is the function of the Third Source and Center. The application of law—justice—falls within the province of the Paradise Trinity and is carried out by certain Sons of the Trinity who serve as the instruments of divine justice.

Justice is inherent in the universal sovereignty of the Paradise Trinity, whereas goodness, mercy, and truth represent the universe ministry of the divine personalities whose Deity union constitutes the Trinity. Justice is not the attitude of the Father, Son, or Spirit individually but rather the Trinity attitude of these personalities of love, mercy, and ministry. Justice is never a personal attitude but always a plural function of these divine beings. Evidence, the basis of fairness, is supplied by the personalities of the Third Source and Center, while judgment is the work of the Stationary Sons of the Trinity.

The First, Second, and Third Persons of Deity are equal to each other and are one, as scripture states: "The Lord our God is one God." There is perfection of purpose and oneness of execution in the divine Trinity of eternal Deities. The Father, the Son, and the Conjoint Actor are truly and divinely unified in their nature and actions. From a mortal perspective, the Paradise Trinity, like the Supreme Being, appears concerned primarily with totals—total planet, total universe, total superuniverse, and total grand universe.

The Supreme Being is something less and different from the Trinity functioning in finite universes, yet within certain limits and during the present era of incomplete power-personalization, this evolutionary Deity seems to reflect the attitude of the Trinity of Supremacy. While the Father, Son, and Spirit do not personally function with the Supreme Being, they do collaborate with him as the Trinity during the present universe age, similar to their relationship with the Ultimate. The exact nature of the personal relationship between the Paradise Deities and God the Supreme when he has finally evolved remains speculative.

Many truths and facts pertaining to the Paradise Trinity can only be partially comprehended by recognizing a function that transcends the finite level of reality. While it would be inadvisable to discuss the functions of the Trinity of Ultimacy in detail, it can be disclosed that God the Ultimate represents the Trinity manifestation comprehended by the Transcendentalers. The unification of the master universe is likely the eventuating act of the Ultimate, probably reflecting certain, though not all, phases of the absonite overcontrol of the Paradise Trinity.

The Universal Father, Eternal Son, and Infinite Spirit are, in a certain sense, the constituent personalities of total Deity, with their union in the Paradise Trinity and the absolute function of the Trinity equivalent to the function of total Deity. This completion of Deity transcends both the finite and the absonite levels of reality. While no single person of the Paradise Deities fills all Deity potential, collectively all three do activate the prepersonal and existential potential of total Deity—the Deity Absolute—representing the Trinity manifestation to the future eternalized finaliters.